Book Review: Beartown (Fredrik Backman)

A twist you don’t expect.
A heartbreak you cannot fathom.
A child who inspires the inspirational.
.

Maya, the daughter of a hockey club that finds out the world is not what she thought it was. Ana, best friend to Maya, living in a world, always knowing it’s truths. A broken father, a run-off mother and a bunch of hunting dogs that let her be Ana when no one else will.

Amat, a boy who never will be and then is. Benji, a heart of fire and passion but only sees turmoil and destruction. And there’s Kevin. A boy with it all but nothing at all.

“Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. The easiest way to unite a group isn’t through love, because love is hard, It makes demands. Hate is simple. So the first thing that happens in a conflict is that we choose a side, because that’s easier than trying to hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time. The second thing that happens is that we seek out facts that confirm what we want to believe – comforting facts, ones that permit life to go on as normal. The third is that we dehumanize our enemy.”

This work is well-written. It is long and it is descriptive. Sometimes you wonder if all the characters and all the narration, the histories, if they’re necessary. But as you read, you realize this book would not be what it is without it. When you finish, you might look back and be able to sum it up on one page. No one would understand though without the depth of the story. The heart. This book is about hockey but yet it’s not at all…
.
By the time I finished, each character had a look. They had specific mannerisms, personalities, and I knew them. All of them.

Get ready for the sequel, Us Against Them…

“Have you ever seen a town fall? Ours did. We’ll end up saying that violence came to Beartown this summer, but that will be a lie; the violence was already here. Because sometimes hating one another is so easy that it seems incomprehensible that we ever do anything else.”